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Doug Nicholls DFC

Discussion in 'WWII Obituaries' started by GRW, Dec 21, 2014.

  1. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    "Doug Nicholls was one of the heroes of Britain’s last imperial hurrah in the Far East, three times cheating death at the nadir of her defeat in 1942 at Singapore by the Japanese.



    Two years later in his single-engined, single-seater Hurricane fighter he was instrumental in enabling General Bill Slim’s “Forgotten” Fourteenth Army to claw Burma back from the invaders and stop them reaching India. For more than a year he flew as many as 28 sorties a month, day and night, unsupported by radar, over jungle-clad ridges up which the Japanese would haul supplies and artillery on their “March to Delhi”.
    Nicholls, a Flying Officer with 258 Squadron – one of the “Few” from the Battle of Britain, in which he had the destruction of a Ju-88 to his name – gave fighter escort for vital supplies and reinforcement troops being ferried to the front by Dakota aircraft, strafing the Japanese wherever he spotted them. Once he collided with a vulture, which damaged his cockpit hood.
    At the end of March Nicholls was promoted to Flight Lieutenant and made Flight Commander. On the squadron’s withdrawal to India after nine months of intensive fighting he was awarded the DFC, and raised to the position of Squadron Leader Tactics based at RAF 224 Group’s headquarters at Chittagong, from where he helped direct the British advance pushing the Japanese out of Burma.The turning point came in Nicholls’s busiest month, March 1944, after the enemy surrounded Slim’s “Administrative Box” where supplies were concentrated, in Burma’s Arakan peninsula, and cut off the West African Division in the Kaladan Valley to its east. Nicholls led the squadron in a strafing attack near the village of Inbauk that drew high praise from the army section commander and did much to set the British on their way to victory. Slim acknowledged his debt to Nicholls and his fellow fliers: “The biggest air fights yet seen in Burma took place in the Arakan sky and went decisively in our favour.”
    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/doug-nicholls-pilot-who-flew-in-the-battle-of-britain-and-survived-three-brushes-with-death-during-the-fall-of-singapore-9937026.html
     

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